You know folks out there who use another language than Perl (huh?) and you want to release a SOAP server for them

1/ that's very kind of you
2/ you need to generate a wsdl file
3/ this module can help
Because Perl is dynamically typed, it is a fantastic language to write SOAP clients,
but that makes perl not-so-easy to use as SOAP server queried by statically typed languages
such as Delphi, Java, C++, VB...
These languages need a WSDL file to communicate with your server.
The WSDL file contains all the data structure definition necessary to interact with the server.
It contains also the namespace and URL as well.

WSDL doesn't works only on perl 5.6 and not 5.8. UNIVERSAL::AUTOLOAD is broken in perl 5.8 and it is used by Class::Hook upon wich WSDL::Generator depends.

WSDL is very flexible since it can describe any kind of data structure in a language non dependant description. But that flexibility makes certain things difficult, such as array of inconsistant data types. So, here is the current limitation of WSDL::Generator :

Rule - "An array must contain elements of the same perl type". Understand perl type as "scalar", "arrayref" or "hashref". So, if you send this:

[
{
key1 => 'Hello',
key2 => 'world',
},
{
key1 => 'Hi',
key3 => 'there',
},
{
key1 => 'Hi',
},
]
That will do, but if you send:
[
{
key1 => 'Hello',
key2 => 'world',
},
{
key1 => [1,2,3],
key3 => 'there',
},
]
That won't work either, since your key1 can have two complete different types of value (a string or an arrayref)
Finally, if you call several times a method, only the last call will be scanned to produce the WSDL file.
I hope these limitations will be lifted in the future.

Paul Kulchenko for his fantastic SOAP::Lite module and his help
Patrick Morris, a Delphi wizard, for testing the wsdl generated and investing weird things
Joe Breeden for his excellent documentation
Yuval Mazor for his patch to make it compatible with .net wsdl compiler
Leon Brocard for his code review
James Duncan for his support